Monday, April 8, 2013

Mary Kerswell, 67 had paid £10 to see her records after a misunderstanding in which she was mistaken for another patient. But receptionists at the Biggleswade Health Centre in Bedfordshire, reportedly refused to print them out. When she took a seat and refused to leave until she had them, police were called and Mrs Kerswell, a retired scientist, was frogmarched from the building, she claims.

Citizens of Samara, in south east Russia, live in fear of the ground literally disappearing beneath them after huge sinkholes have started to appear all over their city, leaving devastation in their wake. The yawning underground caverns are all believed to have sprung up in recent weeks swallowing cars, buses and claiming at least one life.

A French force of 1,000 soldiers in a major offensive has swept a valley thought to be a logistics base for al-Qaeda-linked Islamists near the Malian city of Gao, an AFP journalist accompanying the mission reported.

Operation Gustav, one of France's largest actions since its intervention in its former colony, involves dozens of tanks, helicopters and aircraft, said General Bernard Barrera, commander of the French land forces in Mali, on Monday.

"We surrounded the valley north of Gao, which we believe serves as a logistics base for jihadist groups, and we began to search methodically," said Barrera, who is based in Gao, the largest settlement in northeastern Mali.

The World Health Organization is talking with the Chinese government about sending international experts to China to help investigate a new bird flu strain that has sickened at least 24 people, killing seven of them.

A 64-year-old retired man in Shanghai became the latest victim of the H7N9 bird flu virus that had previously not been known to infect humans, the city government said Monday.

The Shanghai government said the man died Sunday night, a week after first experiencing chills. He sought medical treatment last Wednesday for pneumonia-like conditions. By Sunday morning, his condition worsened, he was out of breath and was admitted to a ward for in-patient treatment. He died hours later.

Indonesian Deputy Trade Minister Bayu Krisnamurthi said on Monday that the new strain of bird flu H7N9 has not entered Indonesia, but the country is on alert over possible spread of the virus and keeps monitoring the development of the disease.

Indonesia has had experience of being hit, the hardest, by avian influenza, H5N1 virus, which has killed 160 people out of 192 infected since 2005.

"Until now, there is no impact of (H7N9) based on report of WHO. But we have to be alert and we will watch closely the development of the virus," he said on the sidelines of a business meeting at JS Luwansa hotel.

The deputy minister said that cooperation with the agency in charge of animal disease had been carried out to investigate imported products.

Chinese health authorities have said that, during the 24-hour period ending 5 p.m. on Monday, China has confirmed four new cases of H7N9 avian influenza, including one death.

This has brought the total number of people infected with the bird flu virus in the country to 24, of whom seven have died, the National Health and Family Planning Commission announced.

The agency said in a brief statement that between 5 p.m. on Sunday and 5 p.m. on Monday, two patients in east China's Jiangsu Province were confirmed to be infected with the H7N9 avian influenza virus, while the neighboring Anhui Province also reported a new case.

In Shanghai, one patient has already died after being newly confirmed as an H7N9 case.

The U.S. Air Force has designated six cyber tools as weapons, which should help the programs compete for increasingly scarce dollars in the Pentagon budget, an Air Force official said on Monday.

Lieutenant General John Hyten, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, which oversees satellite and cyberspace operation, said the new designations would help normalize military cyber operations as the U.S. military works to keep up with rapidly changing threats in the newest theater of war.

"This means that the game-changing capability that cyber is is going to get more attention and the recognition that it deserves," Hyten told a cyber conference held in conjunction with the National Space Syposium in Colorado Springs.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday he is trying to break down mistrust on both sides of the "festering" conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and would not rush into a new peace process.

Making his third visit to the region in less than three weeks, Kerry met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Sunday night had dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday night.

"I am intensely focused on this issue ... because it is vital, really, to American interests and to regional interests to try to advance the peace process and because this festering absence of peace is used by groups everywhere to recruit and encourage extremism," Kerry told reporters traveling with him.

The Buddhist monk grabbed a young Muslim girl and put a knife to her neck.

"If you follow us, I'll kill her," the monk taunted police, according to a witness, as a Buddhist mob armed with machetes and swords chased nearly 100 Muslims in this city in central Myanmar.

It was Thursday, March 21. Within hours, up to 25 Muslims had been killed. The Buddhist mob dragged their bloodied bodies up a hill in a neighborhood called Mingalarzay Yone and set the corpses on fire. Some were found butchered in a reedy swamp. A Reuters cameraman saw the charred remains of two children, aged 10 or younger.

Ethnic hatred has been unleashed in Myanmar since 49 years of military rule ended in March 2011. And it is spreading, threatening the country's historic democratic transition. Signs have emerged of ethnic cleansing, and of impunity for those inciting it.

Egypt has halted commercial flights from Shi'ite power Iran until mid-June, days after the first such flight in 34 years between the countries provoked protests from hardline Sunni Islamists in Cairo.

That first commercial flight, from Cairo to Tehran, took off on March 30 in the latest step towards normalizing ties broken after the 1979 Iranian revolution, when Egypt gave sanctuary to the deposed shah of Iran.

But hardline Sunni Islamists who accuse Iran of trying to spread the Shi'ite faith in Sunni countries objected and about 100 people demonstrated in front of a senior Iranian diplomat's residence in Cairo on Friday.

North Korean laborers did not show up for work on Tuesday at a factory complex operated with South Korea, companies with operations there said, effectively shutting down the zone for the first time since it began shipments in 2004.

Pyongyang's decision to halt work at the Kaesong industrial park coincided with speculation it would carry out a missile launch, or even another nuclear test, in what has become one of the worst periods of tension on the peninsula since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

About 475 South Korean workers and factory managers remain in Kaesong, a few kilometers inside the border with North Korea. The South Korean government said 77 would return on Tuesday.

Authorities have recovered the bodies of two young cousins buried when a wall of dirt fell on them while they were playing in a hole at a home construction site in North Carolina.

The bodies of six-year-old Chloe Jade Arwood and seven-year-old James Levi Caldwell were pulled from a 24ft pit in the town of Stanley, outside of Charlotte, said Lincoln County Emergency Services spokesman Dion Burleson.

Crews had been searching for the children since Sunday, when Chloe's father, Jordan Arwood, called 911 to report the collapse. Officials were on the scene within minutes but could not get to the children.

In a series of lightning strikes, the Syrian army’s 4th Division-Republican Guard was able to drive most of the rebels out of the eastern suburbs of Damascus Monday, April 8, debkafile’s military sources report.

The division’s armored units cornered the rebel forces which had massed in the Ghouta suburb ready to take the center of Damascus. Few will survive the merciless pounding by the Syrian tanks and artillery. In two other eastern suburbs, Daria and the Sayida Zainab, the rebels were surprised while preparing to storm the international airport and made a panicky rush for the exits when they saw the Syrian forces driving toward them.

By this operation, Bashar Assad, aided by his brother Maher at the head of the 4th Division, were able to surprise the rebel forces in time to curtail their advance from the eastern suburbs on the center of Damascus and seat of government.

Syria’s rulers owe this landmark success to the speed of their operation and the positioning of tanks and heavy artillery in the vanguard to lay down a hellish carpet of fire as they moved.

This tactic was almost certainly designed by Assad’s foreign military advisers, either Iranian or Russian, as the largest-scale military operation to be seen on the battlefield in Syria’s two-year uprising-turned-civil war.

Sun Wen, who could not swim, jumped into the water in Hangzhou, Zheijiang province, to try to rescue 18-month-old Lin Sun but they drowned before rescuers found them. The accident happened as they celebrated Tomb Sweeping Day, a Chinese holiday where families visit their ancestors' graves.

An update on the mobile website of BBC News wrongly stated that the former Prime Minister had been killed by a form of industrial action. In reality she suffered a stroke and passed away at the age of 87

The U.S.-China Business Council on Monday criticized a new law aimed at thwarting cyber attacks by discouraging the Justice Department and several other government agencies from buying information technology systems from China.

"The national security of the United States is critical, but it must not be used as a means of protectionism," John Frisbie, the group's president, said in a letter urging leaders in the Senate and the House of Representatives to block similar measures in the future.

"Product security is a function of how a product is made, used, and maintained, rather than by whom or where it is made. Imposing a country-specific risk assessment creates a false sense of security if the goal is to improve our nation's cybersecurity," Frisbie said.

Two more deaths were reported on Monday after sectarian violence at Cairo's Coptic cathedral that the Egyptian government and Muslim and Christian leaders scrambled to calm.

A security source said a 21-year-old Muslim man, named only as Mohamed, died of a fractured skull in hospital after fighting between local Muslims and Copts who had been attending a funeral for four Christians shot dead in a town near Cairo.

The health ministry said at least 90 people, including 11 policemen, were wounded around the cathedral, seat of the Coptic pope, in one of the worst sectarian flare-ups since the fall of autocratic President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Serbia on Monday rejected a European Union-brokered plan to tackle the ethnic partition of its former province Kosovo, a move that could hurt Belgrade's hopes of starting membership talks with the bloc.

But the coalition government called for the "urgent" continuation of negotiations to reach an accord, with the EU set to consider this month whether to recommend the start of accession talks with Serbia.

Membership talks would mark a major milestone in Serbia's recovery from a decade of war and isolation under late strongman Slobodan Milosevic and provide a much-needed boost for its ailing economy, still the biggest in the former Yugoslavia.

It is just 11 months since France elected François Hollande as its first Socialist president since 1995, spurring a wave of expectation on the European left that he would lead a pro-growth offensive against the cheerleaders of austerity. When his party and its allies won an absolute majority in the national assembly, it seemed Europe might be acquiring a real challenger to the Berlin-Brussels-London consensus.

It has not turned out like that, of course, evoking inevitable reminders of the last Socialist presidency, that of François Mitterrand. He came to office in 1981 on a reflationary platform declaring that there was nothing wrong with dreaming; the trouble was that waking up proved very jarring, as the Hollande administration is now discovering.

Growth under the would-be expansionary champion has not risen; in fact, it has positively slumped. Finance minister Pierre Moscovici says it might total 0.1% this year compared with the official forecast of 0.8%. The economy contracted by 0.3% in the last quarter of 2012. France will miss the target of reducing its deficit to 3% of national output in 2013. Unemployment is at 10.6%, and much higher among young people.

The United States and its allies will stage a naval exercise in the Gulf in May to practise minesweeping and escorting ships, the U.S. Navy said on Monday, a maneuver likely to be seen in the region as guarding against a potential threat from Iran.

Representatives from more than 30 nations will gather in Bahrain for the International Mine Countermeasures Exercise (IMCMEX) 13 from May 6-30, eight months after they staged a previous edition of the exercises at a time when Israel and Iran were trading threats of war.

David Cameron urged Europe to “wake up” to the modern world as he tried to breathe life into his EU reform agenda.

Embarking on a tour of European capitals, he warned that the EU was too regulated and inflexible to prosper without major changes. “We want a Europe that wakes up to this modern world of competition and flexibility,” the Prime Minister said. “Do we think that the European Union has sometimes overreached itself with directives and interventions and interferences? Yes, it has. And that needs to change.”

Mr Cameron’s trip follows last week’s decision by France and Germany to snub his plea to take part in a review of EU powers and their impact. The British leader began in Madrid with talks with Spain’s prime minister Mariano Rajoy this morning, and was travelling to Paris for a working dinner with president François Hollande. Later this week he meets the German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Riot police gassed and hosed down hundreds of demonstrators with water cannons outside a courthouse where one of Turkey's most lengthy and contentious trials is approaching its conclusion.

Crowds of protesters began arriving early Monday at the Silivri Prison Complex, which houses the 13th Istanbul High Criminal Court. This judicial body has been hearing one of Turkey's most polarizing and high-profile court cases.

The trials have been going on for nearly four years. Prosecutors accuse hundreds of suspects of being part of a covert ultranationalist organization that wants to overthrow the government and sow unrest.

A two-year old baby from eastern Bangladesh has died of H5N1 virus, the first bird flu death in the South Asian country, a senior health official said Monday.

Head of the country's Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) under the Health Ministry Mahmudur Rahman told Xinhua Monday that "the seventh case of Influenza A ( H5N1) has been confirmed from one of our surveillance sites in Comilla, some 96 km east of capital Dhaka."

He said this was a 1 year 11 months old male child from Chauddogram sub-district of Comilla.

The child was admitted to Comilla Medical College Hospital, later transferred to Dhaka Shishu Hospital and then to a private clinic, Rahman said.

Three new cases of the deadly bird flu H7N9 were discovered in China yesterday, bringing the total in the country to 21, the government’s Xinhua news agency reported this morning. The sick have all been discovered in eastern China; Shanghai, one of the country’s most important international business hubs, has 10 of the cases.

Eastern Chinese cities have been closing live poultry markets and taking other measures to try to contain the disease which has killed six to date.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said on Friday it was following the latest deadly flu outbreak in China “closely,” according to an announcement posted at the website of the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai.

North Korea, after weeks of threats against the United States and South Korea, suspended its sole remaining major project with the South on Monday, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said any nuclear conflict may make Chernobyl look like a fairy tale.

Reclusive North Korea's decision to all but close the Kaesong industrial park coincided with speculation that it will carry out some sort of provocative action in coming days - another nuclear weapons test or missile launch.

A British 9/11 truther is claiming victory following a court ruling that said he did not have to pay a fine over his refusal to pay his annual £130 TV license fee.

Tony Rooke claimed the BBC intentionally misrepresented facts about the 9/11 attacks when it reported that World Trade Center 7 collapsed “due to an office fire, which, even the NIST report says, fell at free-fall speed for eight floors in 2.5 seconds. That is absolutely impossible without a controlled demolition being involved.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is the U.S. government agency charged with investigating collapses.

In an act of civil disobedience, Rooke refused to support the BBC and pay the license fee because he believed the BBC has covered up the events of that day. To pay the license fee, he said, would be tantamount to supporting the terrorists responsible for the controlled demolition. He also argued that supporting terrorists would violate the UK’s Terrorism Act, which states: “It is an offence for someone to invite another to provide money, intending that it should be used, or having reasonable cause to suspect that it may be used, for terrorism purposes.”

A friend of killer Adam Lanza's mother has said the gunman may have launched his murder spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School as an 'act of revenge' after suffering years of bullying as a student at the Connecticut school.

Family friend Marvin LaFontaine said Lanza, who killed 26 people during one of the worst school shooting in America's history, had been harboring resentment towards the Connecticut school for years.

And he said mother Nancy Lanza was so angered by the school's inability to protect her son, she would sometimes sit in his class to make sure nobody touched him.

He told the New York Daily News: 'I think Adam felt betrayed by the school and this was his act of revenge.'

Police are advising people to fight back if they are unable to flee or hide during a mass shooting, a controversial new tactic that authorities say might be the only way to prevent devastating loss of life.

It comes as research based on numerous mass shootings in the U.S., revealed that those who took a more active role had a better chance of survival than those who waited for help to arrive.

Radiation from Japan's nuclear disaster could be the reason why more than a thousand sick sea lion pups have washed up on the beaches of Southern California in the past few months, experts believe.

Earlier this week, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an 'unusual mortality event' after the starving pups washed ashore in record numbers since the start of the year.

The NOAA has assembled a team of biologists, veterinarians and public health officials to try and determine why roughly 1,100 of the frail animals have become stranded and had to enter marine mammal rehabilitation centers up the west coast.

British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford has lost her appeal against her death sentence in Bali for drug trafficking.

A Bali High Court spokesman said a panel of judges on the Indonesian island upheld the sentence handed down to the 56-year-old in January.

Sandiford will be executed by firing squad if her death penalty is upheld. But she can now make a further appeal to Indonesia’s Supreme Court in Jakarta.
Drugs mule Sandiford was caught smuggling cocaine worth £1.6 million in the lining of a suitcase from Bangkok to the island last year.

She got a death sentence despite taking part in a sting after her arrest which resulted in the arrest and conviction of the smuggling plot’s alleged masterminds, who got lighter sentences.

South Korea's Defense Ministry on Monday denied suggestions that a nuclear arms test was imminent in North Korea, saying reported movements around the reclusive country's atomic site were routine, contradicting earlier government comments.

Speculation has been mounting that North Korea will launch some sort of provocative action in coming days - an arms test or a missile launch - after weeks of bellicose threats against the South and the United States.

The prospect of another test would have boosted tension, already driven up by Pyongyang's fury over the imposition of new U.S. sanctions after its last nuclear test in February.

Cambridge scientists have linked two human cases of infection with the antibiotic- resistant superbug MRSA to farms in Denmark. The results of the study, published today in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, suggest the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria was transmitted from the livestock to the farmers.

The type of MRSA which was found in both of the human cases was only discovered two years ago by Dr Mark Holmes and his colleagues from the University of Cambridge. The new strain’s genetic makeup differs greatly from previous strains, which means that the ‘gold standard’ molecular tests currently used to identify MRSA - a polymerase chain reaction technique (PCR) and slide agglutination testing - do not detect it.

For this study, the scientists used whole genome sequencing to investigate two cases of the new MRSA where the patients lived on farms to see if the same strain could be found in the animals on the farm.

The North Korean satellite launched into space back in December of 2012 that is said to be for weather forecast purposes but is being widely portrayed in the West as a veiled ballistic missile test passes over the East Coast of America and as far west as just west of the New Madrid fault line over and over and over again in the next several days.

A Dutch man who confessed to stabbing to death a young British woman holidaying in Indian Kashmir says the "the devil" took over his body.

Richard De Wit, 43, told police he had murdered Sarah Groves, who had been staying on the New Beauty houseboat at Dal Lake in Srinagar for two months with her boyfriend.

He has yet to be charged.

"He has confessed that he committed the murder under the influence of some drug. We have sent his blood sample for testing to ascertain the facts," deputy inspector general of police Afadul Mujtaba said.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has published 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence records on his whistleblowing website.

The documents cover diplomatic or intelligence reports on every country in the world and most of the work was done by Mr Assange while he has been staying at the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has sought political asylum.

The data comprises records from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, covering a variety of diplomatic traffic - including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence.

Silicon Valley kingmaker and TechCrunch blog founder Michael Arrington is facing allegations of rape and physical abuse after an ex-girlfriend came forward with public accusations on Facebook.

Jenn Allen, who is herself a tech entrepreneur, wrote accusations last month that Arrington had physically and emotionally abused her during their eight year relationship and threatened to kill her if she told anyone. In a subsequent post on a news site, she claimed that Arrington had also sexually assaulted a friend.

After Ms Allen's accusations became public, news sites reported another allegation against Arrington - that he threw an ex-girlfriend against her bed in 1999.

Arrington, who has been named one of the most powerful people in the Internet, has not responded to the allegations and he could not be reached for comment by MailOnline.

The Prime Minister issued the warning as he set to make the case for reform in Brussels to three of Europe's most powerful leaders – Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, Francois Hollande, the French president, and Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister.

It is his first major European tour since he promised that his party would seek to repatriate powers from Brussels and hold a referendum on EU membership in the next parliament.

During the trip, he will seek to reassure his fellow leaders that the “best outcome” for Britain is membership of a reformed EU, amid fears that the UK is drifting apart from Brussels.

However, he will also repeat his warning that public support for the EU is “wafer-thin” in the UK and there must be a new relationship with Brussels.

Prime Minister David Cameron hopes to overcome opposition to his plan to claw back power from Brussels when he meets the leaders of Germany, France and Spain this week for talks on Britain's future in the European Union.

Cameron infuriated European allies in January when he said he would try to renegotiate terms of Britain's EU membership and ask voters in a referendum if they wanted to stay in the bloc.

France and Germany accused him of treating the EU like an "a la carte menu" from which he could pick powers. The opposition Labour Party said Britain risked sleepwalking towards EU exit.

Tehran’s intercession in the Korean crisis on the side of its ally in Pyongyang was predictable, even though the US preferrs to ignore the close interrelations between the two allies.

And so, on Friday, April 5, Deputy Chief of Staff of Iran's Armed Forces Brig. Gen. Masoud Jazayeri stepped forward to point the finger at Washington:
[“The presence of the Americans in [South] Korea has been the root cause of tensions in this sensitive region in the past and present. The US and its allies will suffer great losses if a war breaks out in this region,” he said, adding for good measure: “Independent countries will not submit to the US mischief. The time for Washington’s bullying and extortion is long past.”

DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources: The second part of the statement was a perfect fit for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s flat refusal to accept US demands on Iran’s nuclear program. The Korean crisis gave the Iranians the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

As Kim Jong-Un moved two intermediate missiles to the east coast of North Korea, Gen. Jazayeri’s rhetoric landed on the latest round of talks the six powers were holding with Iran in Amaty, Kazhakstan for a diplomatic resolution of Iran’s nuclear challenge.

An unnamed disease is breaking out and spreading throughout gay men in New York City [...]
An unnamed disease is breaking out and spreading throughout gay men in New York City — it’s not a retelling of the early days of the AIDS/HIV epidemic 30 years ago, but one that is happening right now.

In two years there have been 22 cases of men infected with bacterial meningitis, spread throughout all five boroughs of the Big Apple. Seven led to death and 12 of the men were HIV-positive. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene expanded its recommendations in March for the meningitis vaccine to all men who have sex with men — especially those having sex with strangers through online sites or apps — regardless of their HIV status.

Florida Atlantic University Professor Fred Fejes, who specializes in sexuality in the media, said he can’t help but think of an article written in the New York Times when reading about the meningitis outbreak in the same publication 30 years later.

North Korea may detonate a nuclear device and carry out a missile test together as early as this week, South Korea’s government said, as the totalitarian regime defies international concern including from ally China.

Kim Jong Un’s regime is ready to conduct a fourth underground atomic weapon test with two tunnels prepared at its Punggye-ri testing site, after carrying out its third last month, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min Seok said today in Seoul. National security chief Kim Jang Soo said yesterday the North may stage a provocation including a ballistic missile test on or around April 10.

“China and the United States and the world community are very concerned about the provocative acts and statements” made by North Korea, U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke said today. “They simply need to focus on improving the lives of their people getting away from provocation and focus on in adhering to their international obligations.”

North Korea appears to be preparing a fourth nuclear test as well as a provocative missile launch, South Korea said Monday, despite an unusually blunt call from China for restraint.

Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-Jae told lawmakers there were "signs" that another test was in the pipeline, with intelligence reports showing heightened activity at the North's Punggye-ri atomic test site.

"We are trying to figure out whether it is a genuine preparation for a nuclear test or just a ploy to heap more pressure on us and the US," the JoongAng Ilbo daily cited a senior South Korean government official as saying.

First it was thousands of dead pigs--first reported as over 6,000, before the number climbed past 16,000. Then it was dead ducks, about 1,000 of them.

Now about 300 kilograms of dead fish, or 500 to 600 fish, have been dredged out of a dike between the Si and King rivers in Shanghai, Beijing Cream reported, citing Chinese media.

Authories aren't providing an official cause to the dead fish, though they are speculating that illegal blast fishing--using dynamite or other explosives to stun or kill schools of fish for easy collection--may have been the cause.

An area Environmental Protection Bureau tested the fish and found no viruses present.

Two weeks after President Obama’s Mideast trip and barely a day after he announced his intention to restart peace negotiations between Israel and her neighbors, Hamas said it has arrested Westerners it claims have spied in the Gaza Strip.

Those arrested include American, French, German and British nationals who are now being interrogated in Hamas custody, the French news agency AFP announced Saturday, according to The Jerusalem Post.

“The Gaza Strip is swarming with Western intelligence agencies, such as the American, British, French and German services,” Hamas security chief Mohammed Lafi wrote on the group’s Interior Ministry website.

The embattled Syrian government mounted attacks on rebel positions across the country on Sunday, according to opposition activists.

Fighting intensified in and around Aleppo, the country’s largest city, after government forces regained control of Aziza, a village near the city’s military airport, following weeks of clashes, the reports said. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based activist organization that tracks the fighting, the rebels in the village ran out of ammunition and were forced to withdraw. The village sits on high ground commanding the road between the military airport and the city.

Syrian warplanes hit Aleppo in the north, Latakia on the Mediterranean coast, the eastern province of Deir Ezzor and other locations in an apparent effort to counter recent territorial gains by the rebels, the activists said.